Wednesday, August 12, 2009

The last couple months at Technorati have been totally head-down execution, so it was nice to receive the latest comScore US audience measures. For July '09, Technorati Media's network rose to 18.3 million uniques, keeping our rank as the 6th largest social media property and the 3rd largest blog entity:

3 comments:

Dear Richard and Technorati:I write out of frustration. Not from frustration blogging. I've been blogging since 2006 and my blog MADISON AVENUE, The Journal of Social Influence Marketing & Branding is now one of Advertising Age Magazine's Power 150 Marketing Blogs and a member of Forbes Business & Finance Blog Network. News aggregators pick up my posts around the world. So my question is this. Why should I keep technorati on my blog" Why maintain the widget, the tag cloud, the links here and the authority when the authority shows zero? Many of the most influential content blogs in my field include me in there blogrolls and link to me. So what is the point of working with technorati? A low authority, having worked years to increase authority does not make me want to stay with technorati...and I initiated a conversation with the owners of Advertising Age's Power Marketing Blogs, Todd Anderlick to get him to drop technorati from rating blogs in the network. I never get any technical support from technorati. Forum discussions have not been updated for months and whenever I call your office the person answering the phone, when they answer the phone is evasive. Is technorati all show and no go? How about a little personal attention here - or just tell us all you're out of business. I don't care anymore and apparently, neither does technorati. How about pulling up your bootstraps and recommiting yourself to your business? Thanks!

Martin, I appreciate yours and any feedback, even when it’s pretty negative and hard to address. I’m not sure I’ve got a satisfying response for you, but here goes. If you’ve followed Technorati’s progress over the years, you probably are aware that it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Technorati.com was a big idea, and I think it’s fair to say that it was so big an idea that it became really challenging for a small start-up. Yes, that’s right: we were and still are a relatively small start-up with limited resources. Since I came on board two years ago, the first order was to ensure that the company survived, and we actually have succeeded on that front, quite well in fact. Technorati Media is just over a year old, and has already grown into the largest ad network focused on social media, with more than 300 blogs and niche social networks reaching over 100 million unique visitors a month. But choosing survival also meant making difficult choices, and sometimes those business decisions have resulted in less than optimal service levels, particularly on technorati.com. So while we still have much work to do, the success of Technorati Media is actually enabling us to make some major developments for technorati.com (I will be speaking and writing about this a lot in the very near future – stay tuned).

I hope that makes sense: survive, then thrive. The company today is in far better shape than it’s ever has been, yet we know that we still have a lot of work to do.

One quick tip on Authority (and this is true for Page Rank too): focus on getting links within content; links within blogrolls simply don’t carry the weight of someone sighting your content in their own content.

Thanks Richard,Now I at least have a context in which to rest my anger and frustration. You probably don't know me but I am an expert on managing people, businesses and getting businesses rolling quickly for companies like Procter & Gamble. I work for free and I work for food. It may sound arrogant but if you feed me a few pizzas I can have technorati up and humming in about two weeks. My least successful business turnaround at Procter & Gamble netted an incremental $1.2 billion per year in sales by helping a core brand become more relevant to users and making sure that the brand did not misrepresent by over promising and under delivering. I've checked. You may survive but there is a lot of hate going on for technorati right now. You loose those customers and it will be impossible to recover your brand's equity.

About Me

I have been at various times: a car salesman, a travel writer, a political consultant, a voiceover artist, a photographer, a copywriter, a trader and a world traveler (yes, it was a career decision…) among several other things. For most of the last decade and a half, I have a made a living creating content and selling media on the internet (currently as the CEO of Technorati Media). I try to be not only a student of the world, but a participant as well. I learned more about my country living outside of it, and learned more about living while doing nothing.